Mercer Union invites artist Alize Zortlutuna to develop a yearlong series of works titled Surface Tension for the SPACE Billboard Commission in 2025-26. Working across video, performance, text, and sculpture, Zorlutuna’s practice uses gesture, repetition, and ritual to consider the relationships between bodies and ecologies. Often beginning with the forms and narratives that we carry with us, the artist’s work attunes to queer sensibilities for enlivening embodied and ancestral knowledges.

Their recent projects emerge from a longstanding interest in the traditional hydrographic printing technique of Ebru, and include works on textile and paper that resist mastery of conventional patterns in favour of emergent forms. At Mercer Union, the artist performs a sculptural study of the distinct marbled patterns of Ebru by using large-format digital reproduction and physical interventions. The series’ title alludes to the delicate and fundamental act of negotiation between water and suspended natural pigments that is central to the practice of Ebru. The artist explores this notion as a conceptual framework for reading a visual field and introduces a responsive sculptural language of cuts and folds that trace and transform the image.

For Zorlutuna, Ebru speaks to the moment when land and water, hand and breath, touch in a process of co-becoming. In each of the three sculptural banners, careful incisions splay the image, breaking its membrane to release the movements humming within. As changing light, brushing wind, and beading water act upon the works’ surface, a kinetic dialogue begins with the natural elements that were momentarily stilled in each composition.

Surface Tension: Reckoning [Git gel with cedar] is the second edition in the yearlong series. The work is accompanied by a forthcoming text by Tara Hakim.

becoming 
        reaching for

        moving from and returning to
        underneath and beyond

        what’s come before

        the body learns
        again
        and again

but what do we really know of becoming?
        when not all movement is chosen
        and violence insists
        everywhere
        the world burns

        miles and miles apart 
        imperial monsters
        share the same handbook

what then but find a way?
        to sit with
        steadiness
        breathing in
        to move still, amidst darkness
        embodying

        to stay here
        when   being   is   too   much

what then but share our own handbook?
        in returning is git gel
        gesture as reckoning

        a practice in slow surrender
        it can begin months before
        each colour, its own needs
        each of us
        our own

watery dreams thickened with algae
        left overnight
        to sleep   to digest
        viscous, viscid
        heavy yet, light
        alive, always moving
        always exchanging
        inhale

what does not belong, asked to leave
        bay leaves burned

        exhale, a prayer 
        a blessing
        the action between
        hand and water

        might just reflect 
        the divine

inhale exhale, but not controlled
        horsehair, rose branch   softly
        tapped against the hand
        colour released, inhale
        exhale cedar to pigment in water
        steady, movements bounded
        back and forth, fixed ends 
        escaping the earth seeping spirits

I ask, why cedar?
        threading there and here
        it carries all
        paper to water   water to flesh
        a brief meeting
        colour held

        then left
        the body too learns

red emerges, a living substance
        invocation without words
        repetition not as pattern
        but as survival
        reckoning
        as metamorphosis
        water   stain   cedar   breath
        inhale exhale

what lies beneath and beyond?
        knife to pattern
        red curves guide the hand
        rivers and rocks
        a careful incision
        revealing
        what’s already there changed

isn’t that what becoming is?
        rocky surface, a striking red
        I’m taken to Wadi Rum
        desert stone shaped and held
        over thousands of years
        the colour of land
        I was born into. another

        I inherit, but cannot return

this time   not stone
        red again
        but water
        that has learned   the colour of blood
        rivers do not forget

        the bodies they carry

        whether named

        or erased

how often they carry what empire leaves behind
        then   and now
        reckoning with coming and going
        when neither is freely chosen
        the gesture remains
        not to resolve
        but to insist
        back and forth

breath continues, becoming red

— Tara Hakim